Hainton Avenue

Embrace the ugly. Absorb it. And write a poem about it. What parts of your hometown do you avoid? Have you come to feel a strange sympathy for such places? Let me know. :)

The church is up for sale. 

But God stirs clouds in the firmament. Like a kid

playing with foam in a bathtub. 

Speaking of God, he forgot to turn the cosmic hob off

when he nipped out for milk, and thus was born

the contemporary plight, blight of Hainton Avenue. 

Hoards of unsightly plastic bags - "plaggie bags" to borrow

the lingo of the natives - have assembled here... they 

have amassed in such staggering numbers that they

resemble a Mongol army, quietly awaiting the hypnotic 

command of a non-biodegradable Genghis. "Attack!" 

In once stately homes, mattresses are pressed up 

against the windows - to what end, I, the uncredentialed 

urban anthropologist, am unsure. My phone doesn't

signal with the news of an impeding zombie apocalypse... 

why do the occupants seem to be preparing for it? 

The pungent smell of ill-concealed blunts blurs and bends

the air around me. The lushness of the foliage lending

perpetual shadow to the surroundings seems to 

create a somewhat exotic feel to the place - I am Indiana Jones,

nimbly avoiding shards of glass, vomit (such an assortment of colours, 

don't you love it when the chunks of kebab are still identifiable,

improperly digested?), and crucially eye contact. 

As is always the way with streets in disarray,  

you have homes inhabited by a wide array of eccentrics. 

My favourite here is the witchy den with the wooden chimes 

and spellcasting paraphernalia visible in the windows. I wonder if

the coven creature, Salem seeker, wand wielder (etc) is merely

besotted with Harry Potter, or whether, in this street 

where violence can be spontaneous, dreariness delirious,

ghastly, ghoulish, grey, dead, horri-d, wretche-d... 

I wonder if you need an amulet, a Hex, a something, 

just to get the hell around. Just to get by. 

By the time the little bistros and businesses pop up near Freeman Street,

the Dock Tower visible, seagulls on the horizon, I am pretty happy 

that I was not raised here, Hainton Avenue, God's little accident. 

But being from this town, 

it is a part of me. I cannot just disown it easily.